TheNew York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. They often drew inspiration fromsurrealism and the contemporaryavant-garde art movements, in particularaction painting,abstract expressionism,jazz, improvisational theater,experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world'svanguard circle.

Frank O'Hara was at the center of the group before his death in 1966. Because of his numerous friendships and his post as a curator at theMuseum of Modern Art, he provided connections between the poets and painters such asJane Freilicher,Fairfield Porter, andLarry Rivers (who was O'Hara's lover). There were many joint works and collaborations, particularly between poets such as O'Hara,Kenneth Koch,John Ashbery, andJames Schuyler: Rivers inspired a play by Koch, Koch and Ashbery together wrote the poem "A Postcard to Popeye", Ashbery and Schuyler wrote the novelA Nest of Ninnies, and Schuyler collaborated on anode with O'Hara, whose portrait was painted by Rivers.^[1]

Ron Padgett,Dick Gallup,Joe Brainard, andTed Berrigan came to the group fromTulsa, Oklahoma.

Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery were quite different as poets, but they admired each other and had much in common personally:^[1]

• Except for Schuyler, all overlapped atHarvard University,
• Except for Ashbery, all did military service,
• Except for Koch, all reviewed art,
• Except for Ashbery, all lived in New York during their formative years as poets.

All four were inspired byFrench Surrealists such asRaymond Roussel,Pierre Reverdy, andGuillaume Apollinaire.David Lehman, in his book on the New York poets, wrote: "They favored wit, humor and the advanced irony of theblague (that is, the insolent prank or jest) in ways more suggestive ofJasper Johns andRobert Rauschenberg than of the New York Schoolabstract expressionist painters after whom they were named."^[1]

Concerning the New York School poets, critics argued that their work was a reaction to theConfessionalist movement in Contemporary Poetry. Their poetic subject matter was often light, violent, or observational, while their writing style was often described as cosmopolitan and world-traveled.

The poets often wrote in an immediate and spontaneous manner reminiscent ofstream of consciousness writing, often using vivid imagery. They drew on inspiration fromSurrealism and the contemporaryavant-garde art movements, in particular theaction painting of their friends in the New York City art world circle such asJackson Pollock andWillem de Kooning.

Poets often associated with the New York School includeJohn Ashbery,Frank O'Hara,Joe Brainard,Kenneth Koch,James Schuyler,Barbara Guest,Ted Berrigan,Bernadette Mayer,Alice Notley,Anne Waldman,Tom Clark,Clark Coolidge,David Shapiro,David Lehman,Amy Gerstler,Terence Winch,Lorenzo Thomas,Ted Greenwald,Eileen Myles,Kenward Elmslie,John Giorno,Barbara Barg,Jerome Sala,Elaine Equi,Frank Lima,Ron Padgett,Lewis Warsh,Tom Savage andJoseph Ceravolo.

The New York School which represented the New Yorkabstract expressionists of the 1950s was documented through a series of artists'committee invitationalexhibitions commencing with the9th Street Art Exhibition in 1951 and followed by consecutive exhibitions at the Stable Gallery, NYC: Second Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, 1953;^[2] Third Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, 1954;^[3] Fourth Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, 1955;^[4] Fifth Annual Exhibitions of Painting and Sculpture, 1956^[5] and Sixth New York Artists’ Annual Exhibition, 1957.^[6]

Included in the New York School wereBradley Walker Tomlin,Robert Goodnough,Rosemarie Beck,^[7]Joan Mitchell, andPhilip Guston.^[7]

Other New York School artists, including those of the 1960s, have included paintersEsteban Vicente,Richard Pousette-Dart,Cecile Gray Bazelon,William Baziotes,Nell Blaine,Seymour Boardman,Ilya Bolotowsky,Ernest Briggs,Peter Busa,^[8]Lawrence Calcagno,Nicolas Carone,Nanno de Groot,Beauford Delaney,Lynne Mapp Drexler,Edward Dugmore,Amaranth Ehrenhalt,John Ferren,Perle Fine,Joseph Glasco,Karl Hagedorn,John Hultberg,Albert Kotin,Clarence Major,Knox Martin,Hugh Mesibov, Ray Parker,Misha Reznikoff,Ludwig Sander,Joop Sanders,Louis Schanker,William Scharf,Ethel Schwabacher,Kendall Shaw,Gloria Shapiro,Thomas Sills,Merton Simpson,Hedda Sterne, andJack Stewart.^[9][10] In addition, painter/sculptorsKarel Appel,Claire Falkenstein,Betty Parsons, andAntoni Tàpies are known as members of the New York School.^{[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]}

TheAnita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City specializes in 1950s and 1960s New York School art, and exhibitsexpressionism,geometric abstraction, andpainterlyabstraction.^{[12][22][23][24][25]} It most frequently exhibits works inoil andacrylic, as well as sculpture.^[12] TheTibor de Nagy Gallery andStable Gallery have also exhibited New York School art, and in 1998, theGagosian Gallery also in New York City presented an exhibit of New York School art.^[26][27][28]

The term also refers to a circle of composers in the 1950s which includedJohn Cage,Morton Feldman,Earle Brown andChristian Wolff.^[29] Their music influenced the music and events of theFluxus group, and drew its name from theAbstract Expressionist painters above.

During the 1960s theJudson Dance Theater located at theJudson Memorial Church, New York City, revolutionizedModern dance. Combining in new ways the idea ofPerformance art, radical and new Choreography, sound fromavant-garde composers, and dancers in collaboration with several New York School Visual artists.

The group of artists that formed Judson Dance Theater are considered the founders ofPostmodern dance. The theater grew out of a dance composition class taught byRobert Dunn, a musician who had studied withJohn Cage. The artists involved with Judson Dance Theater were avant-garde experimenatalists who rejected the confines of ballet technique, vocabulary and theory.

The first Judson concert took place on July 6, 1962, with dance works presented by Steve Paxton,Freddie Herko,David Gordon, Alex and Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Summers, William Davis, and Ruth Emerson. Seminal dance artists that were a part of the Judson Dance Theater include:David Gordon,Steve Paxton,Yvonne Rainer,Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay,Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Aileen Passloff, andMeredith Monk. The years 1962 to 1964 are considered the golden age of the Judson Dance Theater.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s New York School artists collaborated with several other choreographer / dancers including: Simone Forti, Anna Halprin,Merce Cunningham,Martha Graham, andPaul Taylor.

• Philip Pavia; Natalie Edgar,Club without walls: selection from the Journals of Philip Pavia, New York: Midmarch Arts, 2007.
• Irving Sandler,‘’The New York School: the painters & sculptors of the fifties,’’, New York; London: Harper and Row, 1978.ISBN 0-06-438505-1,ISBN 978-0-06-438505-3
• Irving Sandler,‘’ The triumph of American painting: a history of abstract expressionism’’, New York; London: Harper and Row, 1977.ISBN 0-06-430075-7,ISBN 978-0-06-430075-9
• Marika Herskovic,American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey,Archived September 29, 2007, at theWayback Machine (New York School Press, 2003.)ISBN 0-9677994-1-4
• Marika Herskovic,New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists,Archived September 29, 2007, at theWayback Machine (New York School Press, 2000.)ISBN 0-9677994-0-6
• Statutes of Liberty, The New York School of Poets, Geoff Ward, Second Edition, 2001.
• The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, Donald Merriam Allen, 1969.
• An Anthology of New York Poets,Ron Padgett (ed.) andDavid Shapiro (ed.), 1970.
• Marjorie Perloff,Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters,University of Texas Press, 1977.
• The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets,David Lehman, 1998.
• Maurice Tuchman (ed.),The New York School, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965.
• Dore Ashton,The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, Penguin Books, 1979.
• Serge Guilbaut,How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art : Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago :University of Chicago Press, 1983.

• Tate Museum page
• New York School, Art, in Britannica

• Abstract expressionism
• American contemporary art
• Modern art
• Modernism
• American literary movements
• Cultural history of New York City
• Modernist poetry in English
• American art movements
• 20th-century American literature

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